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Tommy startled at the sound of someone sitting at the bottom of the tree he was currently perched in, looking down to see one of the friends Quackity had brought back to the castle with him. He hadn't really been paying attention to them, but he was pretty sure the brown twin was Wilbur.
"Kinda late to be out in the courtyard, isn't it?", he asked, scaring the man who immediately shot up and looked around, "Up here, dickhead."
Wilbur looked at him before sighing and sitting back down. "I could say the same to you, considering the fact that you're literally a child."
"Fuck you, I'm eighteen."
"That's how old he would have been,", the man said quietly.
"What was that?"
"Nothing, don't worry about it. What has you sitting up there at an hour like this, bird boy?"
"Couldn't sleep. What about you?"
"The same, I suppose,", Wilbur leaned back against the tree, letting out a tired sigh, "Had a nightmare, can't exactly rest well after that."
"Feel like talking about it?"
"Not in detail, no. It's just... my brain reminding me of how badly I've fucked up. I had a younger brother, he would have been around your age by now; even sort-of looked like you. I- He's gone, and I guess seeing you is making me think about it again."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
"No, it's alright. It was entirely my fault, it makes sense I'm being tormented by it again."
Tommy was quiet for a moment before speaking again. "I'm scared of the dark, you know."
"Really? At your age?"
"Really. That's why so many parts of the castle are as well lit as they are."
"With how much yelling you've been doing while I've been here, it's hard to believe you're scared of anything. I feel it'd be more likely for you to attempt to stab something that was troubling you than it would be for you to acknowledge it."
He chuckled, leaning against the trunk of the tree in much the same way Wilbur was. "Yeah, no, I'm- It's something that's left over from before I was at the castle."
"Quackity mentioned how shit he thinks you were treated before you were his brother, said he would have some choice words for whoever hurt you if he had the chance."
"'Choice words' is a funny way to say he'd beat the shit out of them,", Tommy smiled to himself, "Big Q isn't the only one. I'm pretty sure the Queen herself would go to bat for me if she had the chance. I- My brother's the only one I've told about the really bad shit. I ran away from home when I was eleven, doubt my old 'family' even noticed I was gone. Hell, they were probably happy about the fact they didn't need to worry about me anymore."
"I don't think that's true. If an eleven-year-old goes missing, someone's bound to go looking,", Wilbur sounded defensive.
"Not if they've been leaving the eleven-year,old alone in a big, scary fucking house since he was nine,", he tucked his knees to his chest, "That's part of why I'm scared of the dark, honestly. It'd always been a problem for me, but one of the times they left, I got myself locked in a closet for three whole days until my friend came to look for me. He had his dad carry me to the doctor, and it took me a while to stop feeling like shit after I almost fucking died in there."
Wilbur stayed quiet, and Tommy took that as a sign to continue.
"My 'dad' didn't even care when he got back from wherever he'd been, just dismissed it entirely; laughed it the fuck off when the town's doctor told him about it. 'Oh, of course Tommy would do something like that, glad he's alright.' One of my brothers noticed how scared I was of the closet after that, decided he wanted to be a fucking prick about it, and asked me to get something for him before closing the door on me."
He swallowed the lump in his throat.
"Stood outside laughing at me while I cried in there. 'Bubba it's dark, let me out', 'I'm sorry, I don't know what I did wrong.' You know what his response to that was?"
"What was it?", Wilbur asked in a near whisper.
"He said 'crybabies don't get let out, stop crying and I'll let you out.' And then he walked away and left me in there. For the entire day. Our father had to let me out, and my brother wasn't even sorry about it- He didn't understand why that was fucked up."
Tommy wiped the tears from his eyes.
"So I decided I wasn't going to talk to him until he said sorry. And I didn't, not for the entire time they were all home before leaving again. He got so fucking pissed about it, too, he'd yell at me and shit and got our other brother to try and scare me into apologizing for the whole thing. Me, the fucking ten-year-old that'd been fucking traumatized."
There'd been enough time between when it happened and this moment for him to recognize how fucked the whole thing had been. At the start, he used to try justifying it all despite knowing it was wrong.
"So, right before they left again, the scary one came up to me and told me that until I apologized to our brother, he wouldn't even look at any messages I sent him on his comm. And that was a fucking slap in the face, because dad never looked at his fucking messages when they were traveling, and if I didn't want to talk to the other one that meant that I had no way to reach them if something happened."
He kicked a leg over the side of the branch, letting more bitterness seep into his voice.
"And he meant it, too. They were gone for months, and I never got a single message from any of them. He never looked at a damn thing I sent him, and when it'd been over a fucking year without any form of acknowledgement from any of them, I left. Didn't lock up the house, didn't leave any kind of note; I was fucking hoping someone robbed the fucking place, honestly."
"Surely they noticed you were gone- Surely they tried to message you after they got back, or-"
"They did, yeah. Oh, they absolutely did,", Tommy let out an incredibly angry laugh, "Sent me such loving shit like 'Where the fuck are you?' or 'you're not fucking funny, where are you hiding?' My personal favorite was an entire fucking wall of text saying that me doing shit like that was why they always left me at home, because they couldn't trust me if they took me with them for the shit they did."
Wilbur got to his feet, seemingly upset. "But they were looking for you! You couldn't- You didn't let them know you were alright? That someone hadn't broken into the house and taken you or something?"
"Who would want me?", he said, completely ignoring the fact that he was supposed to stop saying stuff like that.
"They did, they- Even if they fucked up, they clearly loved you-"
"The only good memories I have with any of them are the times I went with the one that locked me in the fucking closet to his appointments with the town mech to work on his hand. I don't even remember their fucking names, and I seriously doubt they bothered to worry about me after I left."
"What the fuck did you do, then? If you saw the messages you were sent, and you read them, what the fuck did you do?"
Tommy didn't know what Wilbur's problem was, and he wouldn't be very surprised if the man was projecting given how he'd explained his own issues earlier.
"I had Sam reset my fucking comm. If those fuckers were going to send me shit like that nearly another year later after I'd already found somewhere I belonged, I wasn't going to fucking humor it. I don't think I was ever actually happy before I was in the castle, only thing I missed was the friend I had and he fucking turned out to be the princes' cousin so that worked out for me in the end."
"He knew-", Wilbur looked pissed, but so was Tommy by this point and he was done humoring the man that was trying to defend the shit that'd happened to him without actually being there.
Tommy stood on his tree branch, looking down at him. "Think I'm done with this, hope you're able to get back to sleep at some point. Goodnight."
He used his wings to fly back up to his room, not staying to give Wilbur any more of his attention.